


Void

by Electric_Apple



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 09:59:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6901303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Electric_Apple/pseuds/Electric_Apple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That’s what she calls it – the day John left.  It is easier, somehow, than the truth.  My brother Johnny went up into the stars, and never came down.  In her heart, he has been as good as dead since the moment the shuttle launched; in her heart, for many months afterward, she was as good as dead too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Void

**Author's Note:**

> This is, I guess, a loose companion piece to “Peeling the Onion”; a further exploration of the relationship between Olivia and John Crichton, set in the context of his homecoming in “Terra Firma”.

Olivia _has_ a brother.

She cannot – will not – give up the present tense.

He’s the centre of her universe; he has been since the day that, according to family lore, she took her first stumbling steps into his arms.  Snowball fights and too-hard maths homework and first dates and college applications.  Personal triumphs.  Puberty.  Broken hearts. 

Mom’s cancer. 

They have shared it all, their entire lives.  And it never once occurred to her that they wouldn’t continue to do so.

But then he left.

That’s what she calls it – _the day John left._ It is easier, somehow, than the truth. _My brother Johnny went up into the stars, and never came down._ In her heart, he has been as good as dead since the moment the shuttle launched; in her heart, for many months afterward, she was as good as dead too.

Because John’s death finished what her mother’s started.  It broke her.  For so long, it was all she could do to get out of bed each morning.  To eat, to wash her hair, to change her clothes.  To close her eyes, and not see the pieces of her brother’s body – mangled, burned, twisted –  flying outward from an explosion she would never witness, because it never happened.  To breathe deeply, and not hate the motion itself for continuing to bring her life when he was gone.

But the world kept turning, however much she hated that it did so, and though she kicked and screamed and fought it with all her might, she had no choice but to keep turning too.  The day came when she could even laugh again.  But there was something in her laugh that had never been there before – a deep, purple scar that is her brother; a wound covered over but not healed, not really. 

It would never be absent from it again.

* * *

Lib is turning off the shower when Dad calls.  She races out to the kitchen phone, dripping wet, towel wrapped haphazardly around her. 

Dad doesn’t waste time with preliminaries.  “I need to see you, Lib.  I have some news.”

Her heart, in her throat, barely beating. _Not again, can’t happen again._ “What..?” she asks, and her voice is tight with fear.

“It’s okay, baby, it’s not bad news.”  He is quick to reassure her, but there is something _not right_ in his voice.  She moves to tighten the towel, surprised to find that her hands are shaking.

“Can you make it for dinner tonight?”

“Of course.”  She’ll cancel her date; she’s already picking up her cell phone to search for the number.

“Good, good.  Susie’s coming up as well.”

Now she _can_ hear her heart, pounding painfully.  Susan is coming, all the way from Orlando, and it’s supposed to be good news?  Not likely.  “I’ll see you at six, Dad,” she says, trying to stay calm.

She hangs up the phone and only just makes it back to the bathroom before she is suddenly, violently sick.

* * *

Dad sits them down in the living room, she and Susan side by side, not touching, scared.  They sat here, in this room, on this couch, the day they found out their mother was dying.  In this same room, on the same couch, they learned that their brother was dead.  These memories alone are enough to make her stomach clench and the bile rise in her throat, even without the expression on Dad’s face now. 

He can command a shuttle full of men, her Dad, and get them through the most dire of situations without so much as a drop of sweat to betray his anxiety, but he has never been able to hide it from Lib.  She can read his tells almost as easily as she can Johnny’s. 

Dad opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it.  Blinks, smiles, tries again.  This time, there is sound.  “Johnny’s back.  Your brother’s home.”

Lib, expecting any number of things, is not expecting this.

She stares at him.

“What are you talking about?” Susan asks impatiently.  “You mean they found wreckage after all these years?  And a _body_?”

Lib winces. 

Jack, however, can barely contain his excitement.  He lays it all down for them, some complicated story about wormholes and displacement and alien space ships and strange creatures, but at the core of it there is this: John. 

Alive. 

Home. 

Susie denies it, explosively.  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

 It is, perhaps, a measure of the seriousness of the situation that Jack neither admonishes nor even seems to register her choice of expletive.  “No, honey.  I’m not.”

“But…Dad, come on.”  There is a panicked edge to her tone now.  “This can’t be real, it doesn’t make sense.”

Susan and Dad argue for nearly half an hour.  Libby listens.  Waits.  She wants it to be real – god, she wants it to be real.  Cruel, this hurt heavy in her heart, the desperation she feels at the mere _suggestion_ John might still be alive.

“Where is he?”  Susan demands finally.  “If he really is here, and he really is alive, I want to see him. _Now._   Come on, Dad.  Show him.  Produce the prodigal son.”

And Lib starts to hope, starts to really _hope_ for the first time, when Dad stands up and gestures them out to the car.

* * *

 

 IASA.  Shuttles, uniforms, schedules.

Lib has not set foot on the base since the day after John left.  If she had a choice, she would never set foot on it again; afraid of the memories, afraid she might collapse under their weight.

_She and Dad and Susie, standing outside beneath the Challenger monument, the night after Johnny’s memorial service.  There was no grave, no burial.  Lib wants one, Dad and Susie do not._

_“The stars are his monument.”_

_With his words, her father gives the entire galaxy to his son.  But the stars, however bright and infinite, will never be monument enough for Lib’s brother._

Funny, that after all this time and two of the three most important people left in Lib’s life right here in the car with her, she still feels the same horrific sense of loss as they stop at the security check point and Dad flashes his ID at the guards on duty.

 

It takes hours, inside, to get anywhere. 

The hope in Lib’s heart goes stronger when they are greeted at the door to the hanger apparently serving as operations centre by several high-ranking officers.  And stronger, again, during the long hours spent hunched in the uncomfortable chairs as Dad disappears into another room to carry out several conversations and, presumably, sign several official documents.  Every half an hour or so, he re-emerges to bring she and Susie several steaming cups of tasteless instant coffee. 

She hopes, because if it was nothing, then there wouldn’t be such a fuss.  Such a mountain of official red tape to wade through.  They wouldn’t put on such a show if there was nothing to see, right?  _Right?_

She and Susie don’t talk much while they’re waiting.  There’s not much to say.  Either Johnny is alive, or he’s not, and either way the tedium of waiting is grating on them both so badly that the only why to avoid an argument is to – well, to not talk.

Susie is shredding each of her polystyrene cups into tiny pieces she lines methodically along her thigh.  Her jaw is clenched, the knuckles on her hands white with tension.  Lib feels for Susan.  She wants so desperately to be able to control her world, but life keeps tossing her curveballs and she can no more control this than she can the turning of the tides.  And so she gets angry, because it is better than breaking down, and right now she is so close to the edge that she will tear strips of Lib if she tries to close the gap between them.

The whole scene reminds her, Lib realises, of the long hours in the hospital when Mom was dying.

The thought turns her stomach and she stands up quickly, hoping that she’s not going to be sick, that the splash of cold water on her face will help offset her physical reaction to the emotional turmoil.

Susie loses her temper, Johnny shuts down, Libby pukes. 

She drew the short straw on _that_ one.  _Damned Crichton stress responses._   Be much easier on all of them if they could just cry.

She tells Susie that she’s going to the bathroom; walks, very quickly, across the near-empty hanger to the door on the far side.  She collapses inside one of the cubicle – shaking, trying not to.  Sobbing, trying not to.  Wondering if, perhaps, it would be better to _never_ know, than to find that Dad has somehow misinterpreted the sequence of events that have led him to bring her here. 

Better to imagine Johnny, floating up there among the stars, rather than spread out in mangled pieces among the wreckage of a module she has half-convinced herself she is waiting to see. 

She sits there, huddled on the closed toilet seat, for almost half an hour before she is able to pull herself together enough to get to her feet.  She stumbles over to the basin, splashes the water on her face.  It’s cold.  Soothing.  She scrubs herself dry with a handful of rough paper towels; repeats the process until at last she is calm enough to face her sister.

But when she gets back out there, Susie is gone.  Lib scans the room, searching for – ah, there she is.  She has her arms around Dad and her face buried in his neck and he is holding her tightly, his face sober, the grin still flashing in his eyes. 

Clearly, something has happened while she was gone.

More to stall than because she wants it, Lib pauses at the table housing the urn and the polystyrene cups to make herself another coffee.  To give Susie time to get it together, and herself time to prepare for what’s coming. 

The hope is a physical pain now, lodged deep in her breast.  If Johnny is not here, if this is a sham of some kind…and if he is here, alive, after all this time…

She swallows the coffee in two gulps in a futile attempt to block out her internal dialogue. 

 Libby has been waiting for so long, and yet the moment still arrives before she is ready for it.

Because when she turns back to check on Susie, he is walking towards her, dressed in an old pair of jeans and an older shirt she vaguely recognises – she helped picked it, she thinks stupidly, before an important date with Alex. 

She stares at him, unbelieving. 

He winks at her.  “Hey, baby girl.”

She starts violently, splashing coffee down her shirt and over her legs.  She knows that voice – would know it anywhere, could pick it out of a crowd of hundreds.

She never, never expected to hear it again.

Her voice catches in her throat.  “ _Johnny?_ ”

He shrugs; grins.  Cocks an eyebrow.  Holds his arms up in that oh-so-familiar shrug of resigned acceptance.  “Yep.”

Lib moves to take a step, very slowly.  Believing, in spite of herself.  “It’s really…?”

“It’s me, Lib.”

_Oh, my god._ She drops the coffee cup and propels herself forward, into his arms.

* * *

 For a long, long time they stand there.

Lib clutches fistfuls of his shirt, desperate to feel him solid and tangible beneath her touch.  John presses his cheek to the top of her head. Words tumble haphazardly through her head – thoughts, emotions – but she cannot grasp any one of them long enough to form a single coherent sentence.  So she chokes out tangled, awkward fragments and he replies with equally awkward and tangled fragments of his own, and for this moment at least it is enough, they understand each other because they have always understand each other.

_My brother Johnny went up into the stars, and came down again._

_Thank God, thank God he came down again._

When they finally break apart, there are tears, wet and hot, on both their faces.   

“I missed you, baby girl,” he says softly.

“I’m not the one who left, Dumbo,” she points out, and though the childhood jest curves his lips in a smile, it comes no where near his eyes.

“I tried to get home, Lib.  Christ, it’s all I tried to do, most days.  Just get home.  But there’s…there are other things out there.  Things I couldn’t just walk away from.”

She doesn’t recognise this new voice of his: the hurt beneath it, the responsibility woven through it.  She squeezes his arm, not sure what to say.

He shakes his head as though to clear it; laughs.  The sound is laced with a bitterness she has never heard from him before.  She looks up at his face, into his eyes, really looks at him for the first time, and is shocked by the shadows in the depths of these almost-unfamiliar eyes.  He carries the experiences of the last four years here, in his eyes, and it has changed them fundamentally.  Oh, the laugh lines around his eyes are still there, and they are still that gorgeous shade of Crichton blue…but there are new hurts too, new fears in their depths, and she trembles with the realisation that the man standing before her knows darkness, has marched right up to it and started it in the face and knows, beyond doubt or reason, that the darkness could have swallowed him whole. 

“What happened to you?” she asks.

He shakes his head.  “You first.”

_I graduated, Johnny.  I have an MBA,_   she wants to tell him.  _I finally had the kind of sex you told me was worth waiting for, with Chris MacGregor in my second year of graduate school.  I manage the HR team in a pharmaceuticals company, and I do it well.  I started art classes after work; I am moving onto sculpture next term.  I stopped playing the piano._

 But she can’t find words for any of it – cannot tell this man who has her brother’s face and her brother’s hands, but those dark and shadowed eyes; not her brother’s eyes at all. 

 “I’m doing okay, now,” she says instead.

 He nods.  “You were always going to do okay, Libby.”  He looks both at her and past her, eyes methodically sweeping the room and the people therein.  Assessing, though she’s not sure what or why.  One of his hands has crept down to rest against the butt of a weapon she had not been aware he was carrying.

 “Johnny,” she repeats.  “What _happened_ to you?”

 That laugh again.  Sharp.  Awful.  “How long you got to hear it, kiddo?”

 “As long as you need to tell it.”

 He shakes his head.  “There’s not enough time in the universe to make you understand what I’ve seen, Lib.”  His fingers curl around the weapon.  “What I’ve done.”

 “I love you,” she blurts out, because she doesn’t know what else to say.

 John presses a fist into his eyes, and his whisper is barely audible.  “You won’t, if you hear it.”

 And that is when she knows.  His tell, hidden beneath those simple words. 

 John is home. 

 But her brother – the brother she knows, the brother who listens to anything and tells her everything – has been buried so far inside this man that she doesn’t know, anymore, how to reach him.

And Lib is afraid: so afraid of the darkness in his eyes, and what it might mean, that she is longer sure she wants to. 

 


End file.
